Just sixteen and never seen a parsnip

[barber olly]

I know. Such a shame. Yet another source of innocent fun denied to us by the PC brigade.

The world's gone mad.......

And just to avoid any further confusion, this is a Parsnip:-

Did it get the 'Jobsworth' award on That's Life?

[ahinton]

Lidl makes Tesco seem good: hence their slogan, "Every Lidl helps."

Asda way to do it! (boom boom)

[ahinton]

It must depend on the part of the country you come from. In my part of the West Riding, turnips were the large things that seem to be called swedes elsewhere. We grew naddies (turnips) but never bought them in a shop. We knew about parsnips but never ate them. Because of unfortunate wartime experiences we never had green (aka. French) beans either.

I recall a letter in The Guardian from a lady who went to a specialist sewing shop to buy a thimble. The youthful assistant had no idea what one was. When the lady explained the youth replied 'That's a good idea!'

The version of that which I heard ended with the lisp-afflicted checkout assistant replying "oh, we don't sell those; you'll need the musical instrument shop down the road".

[ahinton]

Unusual to find such unreconstructed sexist garbage these days, even in Mr Pee's posts

It's "unreconstructed sexist garbage" only to those who choose to interpret it as such; all that it proves to me (for what it's worth) is that "Swede" is - at least in the present context - an unfortunate term for a root vegetable...

Now, on the other hand, were one to picture immediaely adjacent to , that might possibly conjure up this particular kind of garbage in the minds of certain more suggestible people, I suppose...

[amateur51]

I know. Such a shame. Yet another source of innocent fun denied to us by the PC brigade.

The world's gone mad.......

And just to avoid any further confusion, this is a Parsnip:-

Mr Pee is the ghost of Cyril Fletcher amongst us once more on this thread

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39312000/jpg/_39312749_203index.jpg

What's 'innocent' about comparing a woman and a nation to a root vegetable that a lot of people loathe, Mr Pee?

[Anna]

Q. What do vegetarian cannibals eat?
A. Swedes!

[ahinton]

Q. What do vegetarian cannibals eat?
A. Swedes!

I'll just have turnip across the hills into east Wales to ascertain if that's really true...

[PhilipT]

I once asked a mad chef in a staff canteen what the "Chef's special" was that day. "Cottage pie", he replied, "made with real cottages - they've been condemned, you know.". We agreed that I should come back the next time he was doing vegetarian pie.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Just be thankful it wasn't Shepherd's Pie!

[PhilipT]

Just be thankful it wasn't Shepherd's Pie!

Indeed! Compared with most vegetarians I imagine that shepherds would be old and tough and stringy.

[kernelbogey]

A non-veg story, almost as old as the book trade itself, but amusingly ascribed to Blackwell's of Oxford the first time I heard it.

A customer enters the Religious Affairs Department of Blackwell's and when an eager young assistant asks him - as once they used to - 'Can I help you, Sir?', the customer says 'I'd like a copy of the New Testament in Greek, please'.

The assistant is gone for what seems to the customer a very long time, eventually returning with a worried look on his face.

'I'm very sorry Sir, we have it in many languages but that seems to be the only one into which it hasn't been translated.'

[Frances_iom]

a similar non-food story is that of a 19th Century court case in Douglas - a Jew had to be sworn which required a copy of the Old Testament - the duty policeman was sent to get a copy (Jews being thin on ground in Douglas thus no prior provision) - after a long wait he returns with a very dilapidated copy of the Bible, stating he had to search the whole nearby Methodist chapel before he found an old copy. Uproar in court!

[Chris Newman]

I think it's the strong taste of swede (probably in a watery mash) that puts people off it for life. Try roasting it which transforms it. Swede (Rutabaga), of course, is a main ingredient in Branston Pickle. My local primary and junior schools both have vegetable plots. There was a Jamie Oliver programme where he took a box of veg into a junior school and so many children just couldn't identify basic vegetables because what they consumed at home was pre-prepared (as ShB) has pointed out above. One thing that baffles me with supermarket fish is Cod Loins. Do fish have loins?

A Norwegian friend (this is not a joke) converted me to Swede by roasting it in a smidgeon of olive oil and sprinkling it with smoked paprika. This was in 1970 before Britain had ever heard of olive oil and smoked paprika. It was scrumptious.

Cod loins? It must be advertisers trying to sex-up fillets. I suppose they do not call them cod breasts as there are no nipples, but they would have done if they could.

[Bryn]

A Norwegian friend (this is not a joke) converted me to Swede by roasting it in a smidgeon of olive oil and sprinkling it with smoked paprika. This was in 1970 before Britain had ever heard of olive oil and smoked paprika. It was scrumptious.

Cod loins? It must be advertisers trying to sex-up fillets. I suppose they do not call them cod breasts as there are no nipples, but they would have done if they could.

Since when did chickens have nipples? That does not stop anyone referring to chicken breast.

[Ferretfancy]

Quite irrelevant, but my current favourite animal is the Dominican mountain chicken, a very endangered beast that's actually a large frog !